Launched earlier this year, Unisys’ People Computing initiative focuses on bringing a “people perspective” to its end user support and outsourcing service offerings. I recently attended Unisys’ Asia Pacific (AP) analyst event in Sydney and this initiative was presented as a key success factor in several infrastructure outsourcing wins in AP in 2011-2012. Case in point: we were given the opportunity to meet Henry Shiner, VP and CIO of McDonald’s Australia/New Zealand. McDonald’s signed an end user computing services contract in 2011 for the management of 43,000 end user devices in Australia and New Zealand. These devices include point-of-sale systems, back-office PC equipment, peripherals, wireless networks, customer order display units, and cameras. Unisys was selected to support the 125,000 people working at 1,060 McDonald’s restaurants. According to Shiner, Unisys’ end user-centric approach was one of the reasons McDonald’s selected Unisys:

Unisys approached service-level definitions from the end user point of view. While the right set of tools and processes are key to efficiently managing more than 60,000 support calls per annum, Unisys approached McDonald’s requirements by working directly with end users — store operators in franchised restaurants — by organizing focus groups to better define end user requirements.